Looking

by Craig Morgan Teicher

I look to prove what I already believe, that each thing my eyes touch with their light is something they have touched already, whose grain or smoothness, whose rippling or cloudy uncertainty is another example, an iteration of the facts I’ve been able to gather. It’s not that I know everything, or that I will, but, mostly, my eyes tell me I know now most of what I’ll have time to find out.

Yet eyes can’t verify anything, most susceptible of all the senses, least beholden to what can be had firsthand, as it were. Everything is seen at a distance; distance is the prerequisite, the very mode, the means of sight.

In this way everyone looks into the future, though its foolish to count on arriving at exactly what one has seen, even if only a few steps away: time changes everything, nothing is as it appears, and everything appears somewhat before it is.

The fingers and tongue apprehend facts, textures against their own roughness; ears always report truly, though memory distorts the sound; and who would deny the concrete mystery of the nose, which maybe has the nearest claim to the truth, the pipeline to and from the heart. But eyes, at best, seek illusions, the fenceposts drawing their lines right up to heaven, and we are too eager to believe in beauty, too afraid not to name ugliness at first sight.

Each month a contemporary poet presents three poems and one personal essay in which food is consumed, passed over, or reckoned with.  Craig is our poet for April, 2014.  

Craig Morgan Teicher is the author of three books, most recently To Keep Love Blurry, and the chapbook Ambivalence and Other Conundrums. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and children.